We going to the zoo, zoo, zoo.

A week ago we went to the Toledo Zoo for the day as part of an event with UM which got us in for free. It was well worth the price - that is a sweet zoo. It was our first major excursion with Hallie and it went very well. Will really had the most fun, Hallie for the most part slept the whole time in the stroller except for right before we were planning to leave when she woke up hungry in the monkey house and screamed like the monkeys until we were able to find a secret place to feed her.

We were talking up this trip the entire week beforehand, and taught Will the song "We're going to the zoo, zoo, zoo, how about you, you, you...". He sang it quite a bit while we were driving there and while we were walking around the zoo. Still sings it a lot.

We had four main goals on our trip: 1) see the lions. 2) see the tigers. 3) see a bear. 4) see elephants. 4 for 4 on those. Above we're posing with the tiger doing the fist pump Will does when he's talking about the Detroit Tigers, which has an uncanny resemblance to Tiger Woods' fist pump after sinking a long putt.

We saw these statues of a "daddy roar and a baby roar" so I thought we should pose with them. Usually when we play the game daddy roar/baby roar Will is the daddy and I'm the baby (basically the daddy roars and the baby mews and runs away). But for this picture Will was a bit scared of the daddy lion. It took quite a bit of coaxing for him to even touch the baby.

The drive home from Toledo is about an hour, and we were going straight to the housewarming/graduation party of our friends KC and Rachel from there, so we were hoping Will would take a short afternoon nap in the car. It didn't go well. Here he is obeying our instructions to close his eyes and try to fall asleep. Eventually it worked, but he couldn't have slept more than 45 minutes and it showed at the party, where he had several meltdowns. Lesson learned on that one.